Keep the Habit Of Practice Alive

I thought I would write some more about my practice habits.

Since I’m not working with a band it becomes difficult to stay motivated to practice. There’s no deadline to push me, no specific songs that I need to have ready by a specific date. I have to pace myself and try to figure out what I want to work on next.

With each practice session I feel my wrists become more fluid, my control gets better. My timing and feel are improving.

Without the set of songs and deadlines the majority of my practice time has shifted to rudiments. After that I pick and choose various songs on my iPhone based upon my mood or I spend some time working with a click track.

I need to start challenging myself more and pick songs and styles that are outside of my wheel house and spend some serious rehearsal time with those songs. But I find a lot of pleasure in playing a song that comes naturally to me. That is one of the reasons I do this, to be happy.

So I need to balance between the two, pleasure and pain.

The other day I read about the Open/Close technique. It came to my attention on a tweet from Dave Garabaldi. It appears that Gordy Knudtson is a proponent or the developer of this method. So there is something to check out and see what it’s about.

No matter what I do I just need to keep the habit of practice alive and well, that’s what’s important, and stay with my rudiments. The rest will come around.